Tuesday, 28 April 2015

After his voyage (1831-1836) on the ship HMS Beagle, when he sailed around the world studying and learning
about biology and geology, Charles Darwin, settled down in England and wrote
the book the Voyage of the Beagle. It
was a bestseller, as far as travel narratives went, and inspired later
explorers like Alfred Russel Wallace to also travel to South America.

Darwin spent the next twenty years gathering material from across
the world, communicating with botanists and zoologists and collectors and
experts in various other fields. He had formed the outline for the theory of
speciation and his proposal for its mechanism - natural selection; but he kept
it secret. But he made a significant reputation as a geologist, writing a major
book on coral reefs. His explanation of the slow elevation of the landmass of
South America - he had seen fossils of marine creatures high up in the Andes -
was enthusiastically welcomed by his mentor and new friend in Geology, Charles
Lyell. Darwin had taken Lyell's book Principle
of Geology, on his voyage and it had helped him understand biology in a way
no one else previously could.

In the meanwhile,
in the 1840s, one of his friends asked him to study barnacles, and explain them
since there was such confusion about them. Darwin estimated it would take him a
month. It took him eight years.

This fascinating side-track to his researches is beautifully
narrated in a book, Darwin and the
Barnacle, by Rebecca Stott. I have been going to the Anna Centennial
Library in Kotturpuram, Madras, for the past few weeks and reading this book.
This library is a treasure house of wonderful books on all subjects and one of
my great delights has been reading Wallace’s books there, among others. But
this time, Darwin.

What fascinated me about this book, were two lateral matters : Darwin’s medical
treatment and his fiscal situation. Darwin was a frequently sick person,
suffering from several ailments of the stomach. He suffered terribly through
his ocean voyages. Land did not improve things. But he was receiving barnacles
by email, dissecting barnacles, discussing barnacles, occasionally going to the
sea to collect barnacles, discovering new species of barnacles, getting
confused by their variety and bizarreness. For a while barnacles were his only
pleasure, besides his children.

Darwin's Water Cure

Dr James Gully, who was recommended by the poet Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, an acquaintance of Darwin, had
some severe but effective methods treatment. One was the wet-wrap ; a wet sheet
wrapped tightly around his body, almost like an Egyptian mummy.

Another was the douche, a French word meaning shower. But this was no simple
shower. A 640 gallon water tank was install on a stage in an outhouse of Darwin’s
house – this let out water through a two inch pipe. This may not sound like
much to those of us who have been soaked in the waterfalls like Courtallam or
Papanasam or Ambasamudram, but Darwin lived in much colder England. One must also
remember that modern plumbing system, with piped water, hot and cold, had not
been invented yet.

The freakiest treatment Darwin underwent, was lamp baths. We don’t associate
lamps with baths! How do you bathe with a lamp? In this system, one sat on a
stool wrapped in towels with a lamp under the stool getting warmer and warmer, until
suddenly sweat poured down like a torrent. This sounds more like cooking than curing!

To top it all, Dr Gully’s water cure included

1.Homeopathy

2.Mesmerism

3.Hydropathy

Gully’s philosophy was that the body's "natural
energies" would cure itself.

Allopathic (Western medicine) doctors today consider these to be nothing
but quackery, with no scientific basis whatsoever. Think about the irony of this
: the world’s most famous biologist was treated by a famous London doctor by
methods that are laughed at today. Of such episodes is made the history relevant
to the common man, more than the wars and wealth and the romances of rulers and
armies.

It was only in the next few decades that such standard practices such as
sterilization, the importance of clean water, chemical pills etc were
discovered. And the invention of antibiotics had to wait until the Second World
War.

A later story is illuminating. American President James Garfield
was shot by an assassin. The doctors tried to extract a bullet by using their
bare fingers! He died two months later, most likely by infection. The shooter was
hanged for assassination, even though, it is quite possible that it was the
doctors’ unsterilized probing that mostly killed Garfield. Closer home, V
Krishnaswamy Iyer of Madras, died of a septic infection when the medal pinned
on him in the 1911 Delhi Durbar by King George the Fifth pricked his skin! This
would be cured by cheap medicine today.

Coming back to Darwin’s treatment. In addition, Dr Gully issued
these orders.

No work

Minimal reading

No writing (except a few minutes a day)

No sugar, salt, rich foods stimulants alcohol or snuff.

Also forbidden : barnacles!

Stott writes that this ban on barnacles was the hardest thing Darwin had to
bear. He was equally appalled at the ban on snuff, but his daughter Annie would
occasionally smuggle it into his study, it seems!

Darwin used his writing allowance to write letters to collect
barnacles from others!

The Curiosity of Englishmen

The sheer variety of collectors and enthusiasts is mind numbing,
and gives an insight into the scientific spirit and curiosity of segments of England’s
population of those times. If Britannia ruled the waves, it was not merely by military
power, naval power or the business skills of its traders – these endeavors played
a significant part in England’s significant role in the 19th
century, which continues today.

James Bowerbank, London distillery owner and sponge collector sent
Darwin barnacles attached to his sponges. Edward Forbes, banker and son of a timber
merchant, followed Alexander the great's Asian route and discovered 18 buried
cities! He explored sea creatures in Lycian coast, where Aristotle had once walked and
wrote books on starfish and jelly fish , became professor of botany at King's
college. Such brilliant collectors and the newly established efficient and dependable
postal system (more on it later) were the substrate of infrastructure that
helped Darwin become such a brilliant biologist. No wonder then, that several thoughtful
Indians in the nineteenth century, welcomed British rule as benevolent and beneficent, a magnificent harness pulling India along into a glorious new scientific
age.

Friday, 24 April 2015

Watching slow sparse
traffic. The sea in the distance, the Adyar winding slowly towards it. A train
snaking into a station. Blue sky. Concrete jungle interspersed with patches of
Guindy forest. A vast cloud throws the whole landscape into shadow, like a
celestial photoshop took. Books in an ac room. A studied studious silence of. .
. . studying. And some reading too. A streaking pigeon, a chirping thrush. Where
thoughts may gently wander, a battered soul may heal, breathing slow to
whispered rhythm, ideas may spring, an aesthete may admire, and a thumb may
compose an essay....

Note

An LMS is a long SMS. I used to send theseto select friends on my Nokia cellphone, before smart phones became common and you could do this on Facebook. Capturing an experience, with some literary flavour. I dont think SMS has to be just cryptic TLAs and emoticons.

Sunday, 19 April 2015

No, that's a false quotation. This is a frequently circulated paragraph, which exploits the eagerness of some Indians to believe that English rule was very destructive, especially of India's "ancient education."

Why Macaulay, not Clive or Hastings or Cornwallis or Dalhousie, the different powerful Viceroys of India? Because this purports to be a quotation from his famous essay, Minute on Education. I first saw this about ten years ago, which simply made me curious about this essay, and thanks to internet, I saw the full text on Columbia University's website. There are several refutations of this quotation also, among which the best arguments are by Michel Danino, and quoted in Quora. I urge readers to read both Macaulay's Minute and Danino's response.

An obvious clue should be the phrase "not one person who is a beggar, who is a thief." There is no country in the world with neither beggars not thieves, and India is and was no exception.

Macaulay was an English supremacist and had contempt for Indian and Sanskrit literature. He made the most dramatic changes in Indian governance - but we have kept most of them.

The East India Company gave subsidies for Vedic patashalas and madrasas for teaching Quran, continuing practices of the kings they defeated. He ended those subsidies and introduced Science, Maths and English into Indian schools and colleges. Personally, I believe Macaulay did India a great favour on this aspect. Those who read Macaulay's Minute would realize that his intentions were noble, though his ignorance of Indian heritage was lamentable.

Sanskrit scholars of English descent (members of Asiatic Society) like Horace Wilson and James Prinsep, opposed Macaulay's plan to introduce English as language of education in Bengal Madras and Bombay provinces, warning that Indians will lose all sense of pride of their native languages and culture. That these people, whose services to India and its culture should be in every history textbook, at least in India, are not acknowledged, speaks volumes of the prejudices of the Indian Government and its textbook writers.

A similar debate happened later between Gandhi and Tagore - Gandhi wanted the abolition of English language, abandonment of democracy, abolition of railways and western medicine. His most strident clarion call was for Indian citizens to boycott English courts, especially their law practices, and the most patriotic lawyers of the Congress Party, indeed did exactly that, giving up very lucrative careers. These include Gandhi himself, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhai Patel, Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), Rajendra Prasad and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Two major historical non-Congress politicians who did not boycott courts were Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Bhimrao Ambedkar.

Tagore hotly criticized Gandhi for being parochial. "The winds of all national cultures must blow into the house of India which should not become a closed prison" he warned.

After 1947 Nehru followed Tagore rather than Gandhi in this aspect.

During the writing of constitution of India there was another debate whether Hindi or Sanskrit should be India's national language. The loudest voices in favor of Sanskrit were that of Ambedkar and a Muslim we have mostly forgotten, who argued that Sanskrit was the language of scholarship and learning for several thousand years where as Hindi was merely the language of the bazaar and had no scientific of legal literature. Also Hindi speakers should not make others second class citizens, whereas Sanskrit was equally difficult for all being no one's mother tongue.

Hindi won the contest by one vote - the casting vote of Rajendra Prasad, the president of the Constituent Assembly

My friend Balaji Dhandapani sent me this message :

Dear Gopu. The Muslim member of constituent assembly who fought for Sanskrit as the National language is Mr. Naziruddin Ahmad of West Bengal. This is what he said in the assembly when the debate came on :

If you have to adopt any language, why should you not have the world's greatest language? It is today a matter of great regret that we do not know how with what veneration Sanskrit is held in outside world. I shall only quote a few brief remarks made about Sanskrit to show how this language is held in the civilised world. Mr. W. C. Taylor says, "Sanskrit is the language of unrivalled richness and purity."

It is the pattern of ruling dispensations to glorify themselves and shower those whom they have overthrown with contempt and calumny.

It is sheer irony that most Indians criticize British for most of the problems and flaws of independent India, while generally ignoring all the best that they have done for us, except for passing remarks that English or cricket was their best gift. It is sheer hypocrisy, considering that most of the political financial military administrative educational institutions today are English or European in origin or inspiration.

Monday, 13 April 2015

When the
Sakya prince Siddhartha renounced his family, palace, kingdom and duty to
search for the Truth, he left Kapilavastu and wandered to several places,
before his great epiphany at Gaya. One of the cities he visited was Vaishali, a
city-state governed by a guild of businessmen. “If there is a Heaven, it must
be at least as rich and at beautiful as Vaishali,” he remarked. Siddhartha may
be best known for his renunciation, but he knew a thing or two about wealth and
beauty.

On his
further wanderings, he met the most powerful, ambitious, feared man of his
times – Bimbisara, ruler of Magadha, with his capital at Rajagriha, the Abode
of Kings. A puzzled Bimbisara asked Siddhartha why he would leave queen and
kingdom, wealth and power, to wander around as a monk. When Siddhartha
explained about his search, Bimbisara merely said, “If you find, please come
and share your enlightenment with me.”

Several
years later, the beggarly monk Siddhartha believed he had attained
enlightenment, and after preaching his message to those who would listen, mostly
others in search of the same, he returned to Rajagriha to keep his promise to
Bimbisara, now far more powerful, the conqueror of several kingdoms. And on the
mountain of Grihakuta, Gautama Buddha held sermons for Bimbisara, his first
royal disciple. On top of this hill, Buddha convened and conducted his first
Council of the new religion he had founded.

Of
Buddha and Rajagriha, later. For now, Vaishali.

It is
not the world famous Buddha, but the mighty Bimbisara with whom the city of
Vaishali is most closely associated. And more than with Bimbisara, a dancer, a
courtesan, a woman of unparalleled beauty – Amrapali.

Amrapali

Briefly,
the story is that when Amrapali, an extraordinarily beautiful woman entered the
streets of Vaishali, the richest men in the city fought each other, vying to
possess her as a wife. Seeing that no man had an advantage over another, they
held council and declared her a public woman. Any man could have her for the
evening for her price. She learnt the various arts and excelled any woman they
knew in dancing. One day, while she was dancing, there was an alarm over an
invasion, a call to arms and the announcement that a king was invading their
beautiful city – none other than Bimbisara.
For the next several days, while the men prepared for Bimbisara’s siege
and eventually, war, Amrapali had no visitors. Until one day, a handsome young
man visited her, and returned every day for several days, and finally proposed
to her. She then explained to him that her loyalty was to the city itself, that
she could marry no man, as that would incite jealousy in every rival and bring
strife to Vishali. The heartbreak in her
suitor’s expression must have been visibly moving. Curious only now, she asked
him who he really was, as she had never seen him in the city before, and all
the able men in the city were too worried about an impending invasion to spare
time even for Amrapali.

He told
her who he was – Bimbisara. How he managed to enter the city undetected and unaccompanied is a detail best
left to unromantic fact fanatics, but whatever his disappointment was, it paled
in comparison to the spectrum of emotions that Amrapali suffered. Horrified
that she had spent weeks delighting the very scourge of the city to whom she
felt unshakeable loyalty, fearing the consequences of her unknowing betrayal,
torn with longing that she could simply leave the city and spend her life as
the beloved of a man, so obviously enchanted with her, she sent him away to
spend time alone. Madly in love with Amrapali, heart rent, with no further interest in the city she lived, and
seeing not the earthly paradise that Siddhartha had seen earlier, Bimbisara
merely withdrew his siege, and went back to Rajagriha, to console himself in
the arms of other gorgeous women and mere royal delights, but still, no
Amrapali.

The
citizens of Vaishali, though, found out that their favorite woman had entertained
their most feared enemy while they spent the same time in abject fear of annihilation.
Outraged, betrayed, disgusted, they chased her out of Vaishali into the forests
tossing curses and stones and cries of contempt upon her fleeing form, ignoring
all pleas of guileless innocence. Time passed, not healing her at all, as she
lived in a hut with her most loyal attendants,
heart broken, beauty shattered, her soul leaking life every day, until one day
she had another visitor. A man who radiated peace and wisdom, kindness and
compassion, and whose ambition far surpassed that of Bimbisara or any royal
conqueror. For this man wanted nothing less than to conquer all humanity and with
his newfound wisdom. Gautama Buddha.

To
Amrapali, now, as to Bimbisara earlier, he brought a healing touch to a soul
torn asunder by the cruelty of circumstances and human cruelty. Amrapali
finally found a place in his Order, his Sangha, as a nun.

Stupas

The
Buddha then wandered to several places and finally his soul underwent the final
extinguishing – the Maha Pari Nirvana, in Kushinagara. His body was given to
his family at Kapilavastu to be cremated, but with some parts distribued to the
other seven of his Eight Great Events, one of which is Vaishali. Mud stupas
were erected over his relics, buried in caskets at these places by his
followers.

Buddha's Mud Stupa in Vaishali, under the dome

Mud stupa - what remains

Sri Lankan Buddhists near Mud Stupa

Vishala's lake near mud stupa

In later
times, an even more famous and powerful king, Samrat Asoka of the Maurya dynasty,
ruling from Pataliputra, decided to rebury these famous relics. In Vaishali he
built a stupa of stone, some distance away from the original, convened a
Council of Buddhists and granted land and resources for establishing a
monastery. Several monks of this monastery were then later buried and stupas of
various sizes and shapes erected for them, in order of their accomplishment and
services to Buddhism in the esteem of their fellow monks.

Near the
brick stupa is a tall majestic pillar, of polished sandstone, that is most
symbolic of Asoka. Unlike the three-lion capital of the Sarnath pillar, which is
now the emblem of the Wovernment of India, the Vaishali pillar has a one lion
capital. The pillar made of sandstone, is smoothened by the technique of Mauryan
polish, and glints like metal by the light of the evening, evoking awe in such
admirers of India as Sir William Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, James Prinsep, who rediscovered Ashoka and decoded the Brahmi script,
and Sir Alexander Cunningham, who established the Archaeological Survery of
India, which preserves these monuments.

Brick Stupa and Pillar built by Samrat Asoka

Tombs of other monks

Single Lion capital

Vaishali today

I
visited Vaishali in 2011 November as a guest of my friend RajaGanesh, who was
working for the Patna branch of IndianOil. His friend Rahul loaned me a car and
his driver Valmiki, who knew only Hindi, whereas my Hindi was scattered and
flawed, tenseless, caseless and with few pretensions of cogent expression. With
me was my friend Karuna from Madras, who had accompanied me the previous eight
days with me in Orissa and Calcutta, and with whom I have travelled to other
places

too, like Ajanta and Kanchi.

Vaishali’s
history goes back much earlier than the time of Amrapali, Bimbisara and Buddha.
It is named after its founder Raja Vishala. Not far from the mud stupa, are the
remnants of Vishala’s palace, a low level of bricks designating walls, similar
to the ruins of Harappan cities.

Raja Vishala's "palace"

What I saw
of Vaishali in 2011 was a small farming village – similar to GangaiKonda
Cholapuram or Vijayanagar. In one segment, there were some farmers houses in
concrete, with cement poles for electric or telephone lines, but no actual wires.
The route to the mud stupa was lined with Indian mud huts, where farmers live;
and in stark contrast, concrete three storey Buddhist hospitality centers all
run by trusts of Buddhist nations – Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand
etc.

Vietnamese center on the road to mud stupa

Farmer's houses on road to mud stupa

Farmer's house - poles for electriciy, but no wires

Vaishali
was recently in the news, globally, for all the wrong reasons - friends of students writing board exams, climbing windows to pass cheat sheets to the examinees. The brick
building of the exam center shows several things – some modernity during Nitish
Kumar’s reign, but the relative poverty of Bihar compared to most of India, the
ambition of its students and the lawlessness of the society. On my return to Patna
from Vaishali after sunset, I saw not a single electric light anywhere, except
one small town halfway back. Nor a single bus for public transport. Even oil
lamps lit only a few households.

The
poverty of Bihar, especially Vaishali, was in stark contrast to Siddhartha’s
bedazzlement.

But
there is more to Vaishali’s history and heritage than Buddhism. I shall write
about it soon.